I was on my 27th mission when we got shot down. See, what happened, when I first got there you had to do 25 missions. Jimmy Doolittle took over (as commanding general of the 8th Air Force) in January or February of ’44, and my first mission was in February of ’44. We got halfway through, and he raised it to 30 missions, and we got shot down on our 27th. I was a POW for eleven and a half months.
I was a waist gunner. We were in the middle of the aircraft. We used to have 10-man crews, two waist gunners, then they cut it down to one waist gunner, when the fighters weren’t as thick as they used to be. On our 27th mission we were leading the squadron over Berlin.
I had six trips over Berlin. The first Berlin raid was March 6, 1944, we lost 68 bombers. That's 680 men. We made it through that mission. We stayed down on the 7th, and went again on the 8th of March. We lost 37 more bombers. My sixth trip was May 19, 1944. We were leading the squadron. We turned on our IP, our initial point. When you turn on the IP, you have to stay straight. The bombardier takes over, and there's no way you can go but straight ahead. No evading flak or anything. You had the bomb bay doors open. We got two direct hits in the bomb bay. And I was in the waist. The plane caught fire.
We peeled out of formation, but we couldn't get out, we were on fire. Our intercom was shorted out. And our alarm bell was out. Later on I found out that everybody went out the front, the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, and engineer. And the radio operator turned to me and said, "Help!" I could see the blaze from the bomb bay. So just before I went out, I couldn’t get the tail gunner, so I kicked the door off, and it went flying back, he saw the door, and he started crawling into the waist. The ball gunner, the guy in the lower ball, he came up, he was in a bit of a panic seeing the plane’s on fire, and through lack of oxygen he collapsed.
I had my chute on ready to go out, and I saw him laying there. So I went back, and me and the tail gunner revived him, and put oxygen on him. We smacked him, revived him, and we went out, one-two-three. The plane exploded. And a fellow who used to be in my crew was flying in another plane, he told me many years later that he told the tail gunner to keep an eye on our plane, and the tail gunner told him that it exploded and nobody got out. That’s the way it appeared to him.
The pilot — I didn't see him until 35 years later — told me the navigator’s parachute didn’t open, and he was killed.
I landed in a farm, and was captured by civilians. They beat the hell out of me. I hit the ground hard and I had hurt my ankle. I was running away. It was a bright day. I hit this plowed-up field, and I started running away from the farmers who were chasing me with a dog, when up out of the wheatfield pops this German with a big rifle, and a big mustache, he was going to shoot. I had my hands up. And he told me to walk towards him. So I walked towards him. He searched me. He asked if I had a pistol. I said no. We weren’t allowed to carry pistols anymore because the civilians were shooting the guys with their own pistols. We used to carry .45s. So by the time I’m talking to him, the civilians catch up and they start beating me. I was a rough kid from New York, in fact I was just 20 years old the week before. They were swearing at me. Then the soldiers came, and they took me to a prison.
I got down in this prison, and they came to take us out, and we saw a couple of other crew members. My co-pilot had a hole in his leg. He was bleeding. They told me to pick him up, and I picked him up and carried him up this narrow stairway, one time I hit the wall with his leg and he started screaming, so they put him in the back of a truck and I told them to get him to a hospital. That’s the last I saw of him. I went to Tempelhof Airfield, on the ground, there were about 50 other GIs there who were shot down. They took us by train to Frankfurt, interrogation, solitary, threatening, we got on a train and went to Grosteitschau, which is near Danzig, up in Poland. On the way up there we stopped, the air raid alarm sounded, we were locked in the train, the air raid alarm sounded, and we were out there. The guards took off and went to the air raid shelter, and we were in a marshaling yard in broad daylight, and they started bombing. Our own planes.
When that happens, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t scream or holler, "Let me out of here!" You just have to sit there, and you hear the flak going, bouncing off the roof of the train. So that was one crisis. Then after the all-clear sounded we went up to Poland, to Grosteitschau, Stalag Luft 4. In all, the Germans must have had over 50,000 Air Force POWs. They shot down like 4,000 airplanes.
We stayed there for nine months. And the Russians were coming from the East. So they told us they were going to evacuate the camp, and we were going to march for four days, to another camp. It was Feb. 5, 1945. So we took everything we owned, which wasn’t much. We took what food we had, and started marching. We marched 86 days. Five hundred miles, in the snow, rain, sleet. Crap. We lived in barns. We slept on the ground. We lived like animals. Eighty-six days we never had our clothes off. We were lousy from head to foot, full of lice. We went through bombings, strafings. Part of that time we went on a train, there were 57 of us in this train, freight trains, we all had dysentery or diarrhea. There were no toilet facilities, of course. Half of us had to stand up and half of us had to lay down, we couldn’t all lay down. And we did what we had to do to relieve ourselves. As I said, we had dysentery and diarrhea. They wouldn’t let us out.
We got out of that, and we marched, from February 5th to April 25. They never marched us at night, because there were about 4,000 of us in this march, all Americans. We marched to this roadblock, with SS troops. We marched through the roadblock. They put us in this field. We saw German soldiers on patrol. They had switched guards on us. They gave us the old Wehrmacht guards, old men, home guards, in their sixties. They told us, you're gonna sleep here tonight on the ground, you're gonna get up tomorrow, you're gonna march eight kilometers to the American lines. They didn’t want to [be captured by] the Russians. We thought they were full of baloney because we couldn't believe anything they said, we didn't believe anything by this time. You can imagine what we looked like, all of us 20, 21 years old. I lost 80 pounds. We ate out of the ground, raw potatoes, raw kohlrabes. Turnips. It got us sick but it kept us alive. Dehydrated sugar beets, anything we could get our hands on.
When I was 15 years old, I joined the 27th Tank Corps, at the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. Two months later I turned 16. We lied. You had to be 17. We got a dollar a drill, we went after that buck a drill. And we went to Canton, New York, on maneuvers, in 1940, this is before World War II. So in October, the draft took effect, and Roosevelt federalized the National Guard for one year. I was still in high school. So I wanted to go. I was gung-ho. My father said, "If you go, I’ll tell them you're underage." He didn't want me to go because he was sick. So I got out. And I enlisted in ’42. In the Air Force. But I was driving a tank in the city dumps at 15. I didn’t have a driver’s license, I’d never driven a car. Where was I?
Oh. We were bedded down, and they said you're gonna march to the American lines tomorrow morning. We got up, we started marching, and sure enough, we saw an American jeep, a GI, and a rifle, First Army, 104th Infantry, the Timberwolves. We naturally went nuts. There was a major there who shook hands with everybody. So we marched across the Elbe River, and we were liberated. We had K rations. Which to us was like a steak dinner. We went back for seconds on K rations. The rest was all history, we finally got a shower, a bath, clothes.
Our guards became POWs. They weren’t the bad ones, the old men, like I am now, 70 years old. We had some bastards in there, but that's something else.
For a long time I had this nightmare. I’m in a barrack and they awaken us, at one or two o'clock in the morning. They say, "You’re going on another mission, one last mission," and we get in the plane, and we always crash. We never make that mission. I used to dream about this all the time. In the beginning, I dreamt of it constantly. In fact I used to wake up screaming sometimes. My wife says last night I kicked her, screaming.
Here's a crucifix my mother gave me. I carried it on every mission. I never left the ground without it. And this part that's holding it together is from an old milk can, when the Germans caught me, they examined it, they thought it was something to do with spying.
Here’s a picture of the day we were liberated, in Bittesfeld, Germany. I weighed about 115 pounds. Here’s a couple of days later, after we got a change of clothes. That’s at Hermann Goering’s airfield. And there’s Jimmy Doolittle. That’s me and General Doolittle in Washington, D.C., at an 8th Air Force reunion. I went [over to his table] and said, "General, do you remember when you raised the missions from 25 to 30?"
He said, "Yes." He was a little bit of a man.
I said, "Well, I got shot down on my 27th. And I was a POW because of you." I was joking, really.
So he said, "Sit down." And he put his hand on my shoulder. He sat me down, there’s hundreds of people waiting to see him, and he’s explaining to me why he had to raise the missions. He’s a general. I became a little bit embarrassed. Here I am asking him, here’s a guy that took off from an aircraft carrier with no hopes of getting back for that Tokyo mission, he was a great, great, great general, a great soldier, I admired him, and I told him that. I didn’t want him to have a guilty conscience.
He said we needed experienced crews. He was apologizing. And he wouldn’t let me go, I wanted to leave because it was getting embarrassing, people wanted to see him, and he kept talking to me. He just died recently.
